The Land of Israel

Level: Basic

 Israel is the land promised to Abraham in the Bible
 Israel is central to the Jewish religion
 Zionism is a political movement to establish a Jewish homeland
 Israel is a democratic country
 Israel is home to more than 1/3 of the world's Jews
 20% of Israel's citizens are not Jewish

The Promised Land

The history of the Jewish people begins with
Abraham, and the story of Abraham begins when
G-d tells him to leave his homeland, promising
Abraham and his descendants a new home in the land of Canaan. (Gen. 12). This
is the land now known as Israel, named after Abraham's
grandson, whose descendants are the Jewish people.
The land is often referred to as the Promised Land because of G-d's repeated
promise (Gen. 12:7, 13:15, 15:18, 17:8) to give the land to the descendants of
Abraham.

The land is described repeatedly in the Torah as a
good land and "a land flowing with milk and honey" (e.g., Ex. 3:8). This
description may not seem to fit well with the desert images we see on the
nightly news, but let's keep in mind that the land was repeatedly abused by
conquerors who were determined to make the land uninhabitable for the Jews. In
the few decades since the Jewish people regained control of the land, we have
seen a tremendous improvement in its agriculture. Israeli agriculture today has
a very high yield.

Jews have lived in this land continuously from the time of its original
conquest by Joshua more than 3200 years ago until the present day, though Jews
were not always in political control of the land, and Jews were not always the
majority of the land's population.

The land of Israel is central to Judaism. A substantial portion of Jewish law
is tied to the land of Israel, and can only be performed there. Some rabbis
have declared that it is a mitzvah (commandment)
to take possession of Israel and to live in it (relying on Num. 33:53). The
Talmud indicates that the land itself is so holy
that merely walking in it can gain you a place in the
World to Come.
Prayers for a return to Israel and Jerusalem are
included in daily prayers as well as many
holiday observances and special events.

Living outside of Israel is viewed as an unnatural state for a Jew. The world
outside of Israel is often referred to as "galut," which is usually translated
as "diaspora" (dispersion), but a more literal translation would be "exile" or
"captivity." When we live outside of Israel, we are living in exile from our
land.

Jews were exiled from the land of Israel by the Romans in 135
C.E., after they defeated the Jews in a three-year
war, and Jews did not have any control over the land again until 1948 C.E.

Zionism and the Formation of the State of Israel

The Jewish people never gave up hope that we
would someday return to our home in Israel. That hope is expressed in the song
Ha-Tikvah (The Hope), the anthem of the Zionist movement and the state of
Israel.

As long as deep within the heart
The Jewish soul is warm
And toward the edges of the east
An eye to Zion looks
Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years
To be a free people in our own land
In the land of Zion and Jerusalem.
To be a free people in our own land
In the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

But for a long time, this desire for our homeland was merely a vague hope
without any concrete plans to achieve it. In the late 1800s, Theodor Herzl and
Chaim Weizmann founded Zionism, a political movement dedicated to the creation
of a Jewish state. They saw a state of Israel as a necessary refuge for Jewish
victims of oppression, especially in Russia, where pogroms were decimating the
Jewish population.

The name "Zionism" comes from the word "Zion," which was the name of a
stronghold in Jerusalem. Over time, the term "Zion" came to be applied to
Jerusalem in general, and later to the Jewish idea of utopia.

Zionism was not a religious movement; it was a primarily political. The early
Zionists sought to establish a secular state of Israel, recognized by the
world, through purely legal means. Theodor Herzl, for example, was a completely
assimilated secular Jewish journalist. He felt little attachment to his Jewish
heritage until he covered the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the
French military who was (unjustly) convicted of passing secrets to Germany. The
charges against Dreyfus brought out a wave of anti-Jewish sentiment that
shocked Herzl into realizing the need for a Jewish state. Early Zionists were
so desperate for a refuge at one point that they actually considered a proposal
to create a Jewish homeland in Uganda. Alaska and Siberia were also discussed.
But the only land that truly inspired Jewish people worldwide was our ancient
homeland, at that time a part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire known as
Palestine.

During World War I, the Zionist cause gained some degree of support from Great
Britain. In a 1917 letter from British foreign secretary Lord Balfour to Jewish
financier Lord Rothschild, the British government expressed a commitment to
creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This letter is commonly known as the
Balfour Declaration. Unfortunately, the British were speaking out of both sides
of their mouth, simultaneously promising Arabs their freedom if they helped to
defeat the Ottoman Empire, which at that time controlled most of the Middle
East (including the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, as well
as significant portions of Saudi Arabia and northern Africa). The British
promised the Arabs that they would limit Jewish settlement in Palestine mere
months after the Balfour Declaration expressed support for "the establishment
in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

After World War I, Palestine was assigned to the United Kingdom as a mandated
territory by the newly-formed League of Nations. The Palestinian Mandate
initially included the lands that are now Israel and Jordan, but all lands east
of the Jordan River were later placed into a separate mandate known as
Transjordan (now the nation of Jordan). The document creating the Palestinian
mandate incorporated the terms of the Balfour Declaration, promising the
creation of a national Jewish homeland within the mandated territory. Many Arab
leaders were initially willing to give Palestine to the Jews if the rest of the
Arab lands in the Middle East were under Arab control. However, the Arabs
living in Palestine vigorously opposed Jewish immigration into the territory
and the idea of a Jewish homeland. It is around this time that the idea of
Palestinian nationality (distinct from Arab nationality generally) first begins
to appear. There were many riots in the territory, and the British came to
believe that the conflicting claims were irreconcilable. In 1937, the British
recommended partition of the territory.

The Holocaust brought the need for a Jewish homeland into sharp focus for both
Jews and for the rest of the world. The Jews who tried to flee Nazi Germany
were often turned back due to immigration limitations at the borders of every
country, including the United States, Britain and Palestine. Many of those who
were sent back to Germany ended up in death camps where they were
systematically murdered.

The British were unable to come up with a solution that would satisfy either
Arabs or Jews, so in 1947, they handed the problem to the newly-founded United
Nations, which developed a partition plan dividing Palestine into Jewish and
Arab portions. The plan was ratified in November 1947. The mandate expired on
May 14, 1948 and British troops pulled out of Palestine. The Jews of Palestine
promptly declared the creation of the State of Israel, which was recognized by
several Western countries immediately.

However, the surrounding Arab nations did not recognize the validity of Israel
and invaded, claiming that they were filling a vacuum created by the
termination of the mandate and the absence of any legal authority to replace
it. The Arabs fought a year-long war to drive the Jews out. Miraculously, the
new state of Israel won this war, as well as every subsequent Arab-Israeli war,
gaining territory every time the Arabs attacked them.

Israel Today

Today,
approximately five million Jews, more than a third of the world's Jewish
population, live in the land of Israel. Jews
make up more than eighty percent of the population of the land, and Jews are in
political control of the land, though non-Jews who become citizens of Israel
have the same legal rights as Jewish citizens of Israel. In fact, there are a
few Arab members of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament).

About half of all Israelis are Mizrachim,
descended from Jews who have been in the land since ancient times or who were
forced out of Arab countries after Israel was founded. Most of the rest are
Ashkenazic, descended from Jews who fled
persecution in Eastern Europe starting in the late 1800s, from Holocaust
survivors, or from other immigrants who came at various times. About 1% of the
Israeli population are the black Ethiopian Jews who fled during the brutal
Ethiopian famine in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Jews continue to immigrate to Israel in large numbers. Immigration to Israel is
referred to as aliyah (literally, ascension). Under Israel's Law of Return, any
Jew who has not renounced the Jewish faith (by
converting to another religion) can automatically become an Israeli citizen,
somewhat similar to the way Ireland gives automatic citizenship to second or
third generation descendants of Irish citizens.
Gentiles may also become citizens of Israel
after undergoing a standard naturalization process, much like the one required
to become a United States citizen.

Israel is governed by a legislative body called the Knesset (literally,
"Assembly"), made up of 120 members. Under the Israeli electoral system, each
party presents a list of candidates, and voters vote for the list rather than
for individual candidates. The party receives a number of seats proportional to
the number of votes it received, thus a party getting 10% of the vote will get
10% of the available seats. As a result, no Israeli party ever has a majority
of the seats in the Knesset, and governmental business is conducted by
coalition building. This system can give minority groups a significant amount
of power, because their support may be needed to gain a majority. Israel also
has a president, elected by the Knesset, and a Prime Minister, formerly elected
directly but this system is in flux.

Most Jews today support the existence of the state of Israel, though not
necessarily all of the policies of its government (as one would expect in any
democracy). There are a small number of secular Jews who are anti-Zionist.
There is also a very small group of right-wing
Orthodox Jews who object to the existence of
the state of Israel, maintaining that it is a sin for us to create a Jewish
state when the messiah has not yet come.
However, this viewpoint does not reflect the mainstream opinion of Orthodoxy.
Most Orthodox Jews support the existence of the state of Israel as a homeland,
even though it is not the theological state of Israel that will be brought
about by the messiah.

Israel Links

This page barely scratches the surface of all there is to say about Israel and
Zionism. There are entire sites devoted to these subjects. Here are a few that
are worth checking out:

Virtual Jerusalem is a great
place to start your search for information about Israel. The site is based in
Israel, and has lots of useful information, including Israeli news, travel
information, information about making aliyah, and lots of great links.

If you are interested in the history of Zionism, you may want to read the
founding treatise on the subject, Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State
(Paperback)
(Kindle).